~ Echoes of fields, fairs, and a river that flows on

When I think back to my earliest winters in Jambani, my ancestral village, it is always around Makar Sankranti, the festival that marks both the end of harvest and the beginning of celebration. For farming families, it is the season of reward, when the land has given back and the villages turn festive.

We visited every winter until I was fifteen or sixteen. I still remember arriving at Gorumahisani railway station, a small dead-end line but one of the oldest in India, or sometimes stepping off the bus. From there the journey was only a few kilometres, but unforgettable. We would ride in a, our family owned, bullock or buffalo cart through golden fields of ripened paddy, the winter sun laying its soft glow on the land and we gently swaying by to sound of the pebbles under the wheel. Even now, thinking of those rides fills my heart with pleasure.

The house we stayed in, our old ancestral house, was big, with mud walls, countless rooms, and a courtyard that echoed with every shout and laugh. On Sankranti eve, I would be wrapped in a blanket while village youths dove into the icy river before dawn, a Sankranti ritual followed since ages. Their joyous cries carried through the cold air, reaching me half-asleep and half-dreaming.

One clear memory is the Tusu Porob mela on the riverbank. The river looked impossibly wide to my young eyes. Stalls lined its edges with toys, sweets, and small treasures. We spent hours in the winter sun, wandering and playing, clutching new toys as if they were fortune itself. The festival itself carries stories as old as the fields. Some say Tusu was once Tusumoni, a village girl whose beauty drew the wrath of a ruler. Unwilling to yield, she chose death in the river on Makar Sankranti. Each year, the immersion of the idol is said to echo that sacrifice, turning grief into song and song into festival. Others believe Tusu is no single person but the image of every maiden enduring the hardships of rural life, her joys and sorrows woven into the folk songs still sung today. Between legend and ritual, the mela remains a fair of colour, toys, and voices on the riverbank.

And then there was the river itself, not mighty but deep enough to be our playground. Twice a day we went with cousins and village kids, clambering over rocks, diving into its cool waters, splashing for hours. I tried, unsuccessfully, to learn swimming there, my eyes red from staying in too long. The scoldings at home were certain, but so was the joy of the river. Even now it flows the same way, with wide grassy banks inviting an evening walk and a dip for old times’ sake.

Winter afternoons belonged to the bagan, the garden across from our house with bamboo groves, vegetable rows, and tall stacks of hay. We cousins would leap off from heights that now make me shiver, perhaps fifteen feet or more, landing in soft straw and laughing. Cricket, marbles, endless running games: the bagan was our kingdom.

That same bagan is now where Ama Kutir stands. The haystacks are gone, but the land still holds the sound of our laughter, the warmth of the afternoon sun, the taste of Sankranti.

Life has its own way of circling back. Years and journeys may take us far, but some places keep calling, not with noise but with a quiet pull. For me, my village is that place. In returning, I have not just come home, I have found again the simple ground where memory and identity meet.

Here, the fields still turn gold, the courtyard still echoes with childhood, and the river still flows.

– Anubhav

“For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.”
– Alfred Tennyson, The Brook